How AnotherHowie started their logo design journey

Summary

I'm looking for a crisp, clean logo for my open source network monitoring application. I have a few ideas, but open to anything that fits!

Company name

network-weathermap.com

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

My open source project has gotten to the stage where it needs a nice logo, which will also form part of a site redesign. Rather than do the usual open-source method of a user-competition, I thought I'd let the pros try, and re-distribute some of my advertising revenue :-)

I'm looking for a roughly-square logo, or something that can have a square variation (for icons, badges, etc) and text/tagline header (this kind of shape with a seperatable logo, but actually I don't particularly like that logo).

The project is Network Weathermap. The tagline is currently "See everything". What it does is create live network diagrams showing traffic on your network, using data from your existing monitoring system. It's not exclusively for networks (I use it to draw temperature maps, for example), but that's the current focus.

Previous attempts by me to get this done have involved some sort of visual pun with the standard router icon (circle with a cross/arrows) and weather symbols. I toyed briefly with something that was half football strategy blackboard (x's, o's and arrows) and again with the router icons. I couldn't get anything useful out of those, but that's not to say it couldn't be done.

I recognise that this is a little vague, but I intened to give feedback early and often to hopefully firm up some ideas.

Wants

- limited palette (for printing)
- workable/recognisable in monochrome would be handy
- usable on dark or light backgrounds a plus, but not a showstopper if not.
- text with graphic
- Vector artwork

Don't want

- anything *too* weathery - I don't want to give the impression that it really is something to do with rain and snow!
- doesn't need to fit with the existing site - that's just a template that will be going soon, driven partly by the new logo.